The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  Before we left I did not even say goodbye to him. I had nothing to say to him, nothing that would not earn me another bruise that I would have to keep hidden in shame.

  As every other night for as long as I can now remember, he is there in my thoughts as I finally drift off to sleep. And in my slumber he continues to pursue me, an endless chase through the wilderness of my dreams. The great, white bear is there again, too, bounding on huge paws over the rocks with such speed and agility that I cannot tell which of my hunters will reach me first. But the earth shakes under the bear’s advance, and he almost has his hands on my – on our – crying daughter as I grasp her to my chest, and I am shouting for help, and the bear’s claws look as sharp as knives, and its eyes are black…

  With a gasp I am awake, sitting upright in shock. I see that it is only Malik who is before me now, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed. Although I cannot see his eyes clearly in the near-darkness, I feel his hand gently on my shoulder; his head turns towards Neil, who is still sleeping soundly next to Boo, and I know what he is thinking.

  ‘No,’ I stutter, realising I must have been calling out loud in my sleep, ‘There was a bear – a huge, white bear. Chasing me. It was so close.’ I falter to a stop at the strangeness of my words. I am thankful for the darkness which hides the colour that must be flushing my cheeks and spares me the embarrassment of meeting Malik’s eyes. I sense that they are fixed on me. His breath is light; he does not move. I am comforted by the warmth of him as his grip on my shoulder tightens.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ he says quietly. ‘He will not hurt you.’

  Then he is gone and the cold bite of the night air surrounds me. I snuggle down into the blankets and sink swiftly into sleep. My dreams are filled with the swelling sea and a gentle north wind.

  ◆◆◆

  Rolling waves, a biting chill, I hear the laughter of the wheeling seagulls off the Aberdeenshire coast. The boat pitches and rocks, and my stomach is tossed from side to side. It is too cold for Boo out on the deck where there is no shelter from the wind that drives across the open ocean. Inside, the heat of her little body against mine is unbearable. Nausea broiling, I forcefully entrust her to Neil – who protests but soon gives in at the sight of my pale face – and make my way slowly out on to the deck at the rear of the ship.

  We have left Aberdeen behind, smudged into the horizon. We are headed north, tracing the east coast of Scotland: I can just make out its undulating shape in the failing light. I pull my coat more tightly around my body, my loose hair streams in ribbons across my eyes, which sting with the black smoke that belches from the chimney of the boat and merges with the wild wind. My knees seem to creak as I seek out a more sheltered spot and rest my aching bones on one of the skeletal metal chairs that line the outside wall. There is a strange feeling of calm away from the howl of the wind, though I can still feel the vibration of the boat’s engine shuddering up through the chair, up the length of my spine. I cross my arms tightly over my chest, watch as the sky grows darker.

  I am roused by the movement of someone sliding into the chair beside mine. It is Malik, his eyes dulled by a look of discomfort.

  ‘Seasick too?’ I ask, finding the uncomfortable need to raise my voice over the relentless chug of the engine below us. Malik nods, drawing into himself as the wind tears across us. For some time neither of us says a word, until I can summon the courage to speak. I ask what is always foremost on my mind: ‘Is Neil all right?’ My voice is hesitant. ‘With the baby?’

  He smiles unexpectedly as I say this, and his cheeks are beginning to flush with colour from the weather’s bite.

  ‘Don’t worry, they are both happy.’

  My body aches with relief, comforted by the words of a stranger.

  ‘I worry so much,’ I find myself admitting, ‘when I can’t look after her.’

  ‘She will be happy with her father for a while.’

  ‘Oh, Neil’s not –.’ The words are out of my mouth before I have a chance to think them through. ‘I mean, her father is… somewhere else. A long way from here, from… this.’ I hear a tremor in my voice as I nod in the direction of the swirling, wild waters around the boat and the grey plane of the sea that stretches all the way to the horizon.

  ‘I suppose Neil’s the closest she has to a father now,’ I add, striving to sound light-hearted in the hope that it might hide the emotion that is threatening to surface. But I can see by the way Malik’s gaze lingers on me – from the corner of my eye – that he is not fooled. He says nothing, and I pretend not to notice his looking at me as I feel my cheeks flush with colour: red, the colour of shame, the shame of being a single mother and having to admit that I have failed my daughter. My stomach churns. Perhaps I have made a terrible mistake.

  I close my eyes tightly against the wind until this new wave of nausea dissipates.

  ‘When I feel seasick,’ Malik’s voice is close to my ear, soft, mingling with the noise of the boat. I open my eyes. ‘I imagine all the creatures below us in the water, the fish, the seals, the… the really big ones?’ He slides his hands through the air to either side of him, above his knees and mine, in illustration.

  I can’t help but giggle. ‘You mean whales?’

  He grins. His eyes crease at the corners. ‘Whales. I think of them all swimming, deeper and deeper to the sea bed where they will find the Mother of the Sea.’

  ‘The Mother of the Sea?’

  ‘She was a woman once, a long time ago…’

  His eyes shine as he tells the story, his English broken but his words strong. A young woman, tricked into marriage with a seagull, cast by one she loved into the depths of the ocean…

  It has begun to rain lightly. The skin of my face tingles with its cool caress as Malik’s story comes to a close. All at once we are returned to the world of the present. I steal a sideways glance at Malik: the faraway look has crept back into his eyes, which had burned with an inner fire as he relayed this strange story from a strange land. I fight the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder, to connect us, to acknowledge that we are alone and adrift in a sea that we do not know – both of us together. Yet with every passing second I feel myself drifting further and further away from this fleeting moment of connection, until I realise that we are each adrift in our own ocean and the two do not share their waters.

  Nonetheless the subject of Malik’s story stays with me. I see her – the Mother of the Sea – when I close my eyes later on, to the electric lighting of the ferry’s interior. Her bed is the rocks that line the bottom of the sea, her hair – black, like Malik’s – snakes out from her head in curling tendrils, suspended in the gentle swell of the current; her eyes are dark and deep, her face almost white with the death that has only half claimed her. Beautiful, but so, so sad.

  Boo has, at long last, drifted off to sleep beside me, worn out by Neil’s excitement as he showed her around the ship. I have chosen a corner for us to lie in, as out-of-the-way as possible, hidden from the brightest lights and the lingering glances of the other passengers as I try to breastfeed her discreetly. I have made a makeshift bed with my coat. It is not very comfortable but I am so drained by nausea I barely notice. Neil’s heavy breathing is just audible from where he reclines curled up in a chair, his coat pulled over his head. The rocking of the ship is soothing now, up and down, to the engine’s rhythmical chug-chugging and the gentle lullaby of the murmur of the few passengers who are still awake. I pull my blanket around me.

  There is a soft noise nearby, and opening my eyes I see Malik laying his own makeshift bed beside me and my daughter.

  ‘Malik?’ I whisper, my voice blurred by near-slumber, ‘What happened to the seagull from the story? After he tricked the girl, the Mother of the Sea, into marrying him – did somebody catch him? Did he do it again?’

  He lies down on his back. I can see his one dark eye turned towards the ceiling, yet dream-like as though he sees something else entirely.

  ‘He tricked many people.’
r />   ‘Did he trick you?’

  Malik closes his eyes. ‘He tricked many people.’

  Boo tosses and turns throughout the night, disturbed by the glare of the electric lights. Only half-awake I manoeuvre her onto my breast every time, trying to black out the lights with the blanket until she settles down once more, only to wake again what seems like moments later. But she must sleep soundly at some point, for when I drift into the waking world towards morning I am groggy from deep sleep. Immediately my heart leaps into my throat – where is Boo? I sit up, blinking the relentless light from my eyes.

  But she is there: with Malik. She appears to have draped herself across his chest, her puckered, pink lips moving silently with the flow of her dreams. He, too, is sleeping soundly. The sight is so unexpected, so strange, that all I can do is stare for a few moments as my mind takes it in. I must not disturb them, is my only thought.

  My muscles creak with the strain of a night spent on the hard floor as I rise to my feet. I smooth down my crumpled clothes with my hands, then tease out the ruffled plaits in my hair and run my fingers through the loose knots and mousey waves.

  Neil is looking in my direction with blurred eyes: a look of drowsy confusion as though he is trying to recall where he is.

  ‘Is that you, Martha?’ He squints as me. ‘Where did I put my glasses?’

  They are on the floor underneath his chair. I deliver them into his hands as I sit down beside him. Spectacles in place, he catches sight of Boo and Malik in their shared comfort of slumber.

  ‘She’s really taken a shine to him, eh?’

  I hear an edge to his voice.

  ‘You’re not jealous, Neil?’ I nudge his elbow with mine. He scowls, removes his glasses again and rubs at the lenses with the sleeve of his jumper.

  Outside it is still dark, but I gather from the stirrings of the other passengers, waking groggily from snatched sleep, that the morning proper must be in its beginnings. The ferry rocks gently on an apparently calm sea.

  Neil sighs heavily.

  ‘Well, Martha, we’ve done it. We’ve escaped. If we try to put any more distance between ourselves and the people who have hurt us, then we’ll be needing passports. And fuller wallets. But he won’t find you here, that’s for sure.’ His tone is too light-hearted to offer any reassurance. I perceive also, yet choose to ignore, the tones of apprehension that bubble through his words, betraying his fear that I have brought him to the ends of the Earth.

  He continues, ‘Unless we find him stowed away under the wheel arches.’

  ‘Neil, don’t joke about that!’ I snap, more sharply than I had intended, before the last of his words has even left his lips. Pursuing us across the cold sea, and one by one he will chop off my fingers until I can hold on no longer… All at once, vividly, I see the image of the great, white bear. The one who, I recall, weaved in and out of my broken dreams throughout the night – light footfall across the garish patterned carpet of the ship’s interior – casting an unnatural shadow in the electric light. Moved silently into the snatched darkness of sleep and the wild landscape of my dreams.

  ‘Sorry, Martha,’ Neil mutters. He sighs again. ‘I’m just a bit… on edge. I mean, what am I going to do? Who on earth will give me a job? How will we live?’

  I lay my hand on his arm, try to keep my voice steady. ‘Auntie Jeanie will help. She’ll know someone.’

  Neil looks at me, clearly now through the window of his spectacles, his eyes creased at the corners. He reaches out to take both my hands in his.

  ‘Martha, will you marry me?’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’ I pull my hands away, shake my head to show that this joke-in-all-seriousness is unnecessary – unhelpful. ‘We’ll find a way.’

  He slumps back in his chair, blows air out from between pursed lips. Boo is stirring; Malik, too. He runs his hand over her downy head as she raises it groggily from his chest, as though it is the most natural thing in the world to wake beneath the weight of somebody else’s child. She looks at him, then sits back on her haunches and runs her gaze – eyes swollen from sleep – around the room. Her legs whir into motion the second she catches sight of me, and I catch her as she reaches me, lift her up onto my lap and kiss the top of her head, enjoying its familiar smell. Out of the corner of my eye I see Malik folding away his coat-bed, and something jolts within me, for I know I should not be looking.

  Neil bids him a cheery Good Morning, demonstrating how effectively he has learned to mask his feelings. Or perhaps he is simply trying to make the best of the situation in a way I can never seem to manage.

  Malik nods in response. All at once I am conscious of my hair falling into my eyes, unwashed, and yesterday’s crumpled clothes, dusty from a night spent sleeping on the floor. And my daughter pulling at my blouse, demanding another feed – what if everyone sees? My body aches with weariness.

  It is not long before a voice over the loudspeaker informs us that we must return to our vehicle. Back into the bowels of the boat, the sickening smell of petrol fumes, the noise of engine after engine igniting, spluttering, rumbling. When we drive out of the ferry’s yawning mouth into the perpetual night and the harbour’s lights, I am gripped by the uncomfortable feeling that we have travelled no distance at all.

  We drive in silence, each sunk in our own thoughts. Boo, bored of this tin can environment, writhes restlessly in my lap, hangs off my shoulders, pulls at my blouse. My body is tense, a coiled spring. If only she would climb onto Malik again, let me breathe. But I am her mother, her only parent: I must give her everything I have within me, not hand her over to be entertained by a stranger. However kind he may seem. Each time she throws her strong little body around, shrieking with frustration as I try to confine her to my lap, I see him glancing over. And I am careful not to catch his eye in the mirror, in case he offers to take her from me for a moment’s help – in case I blush with shame.

  Rays of sunlight begin to spill into the valleys with the late-morning sunrise, shadows and light in ethereal play. Hills morph into mountains, the road dips tunnel-like down to wide bays and distant ocean horizons. I long to stop, to climb out of the van and breathe it all in. But I am anxious for our journey’s end.

  As we draw nearer to our destination, my memory is ignited. I recognise the small stone houses that make up the village through which we are passing; the tiny church whose doors open out onto a view of the bay; the curved, protective wall of the harbour and, finally, the cottage itself. It only comes into view as we follow the track that snakes up out of the village – nestled into the contours of the hills, the sky above and the sea below. And my father’s sister is waiting for us outside the house, unchanged for all these years that have passed, as the van rolls noisily to a stop. And in a moment I am in her arms, sobbing like the child I once was.

  4

  ‘You should write to your mother, Martha.’ Auntie Jeanie lays her wrinkled hand on mine as she sits down beside me at the kitchen table. ‘Let her know you’re here.’

  I shake my head, hold my gaze away from hers.

  ‘She wouldn’t be happy to know I’m here.’ I cannot calm the tremor in my voice. Jeanie takes her hand away again to pour from the teapot that has been brewing on the table. The steam curls visibly towards the low ceiling, mingles with the long, grey locks of her hair.

  ‘She never liked you, did she, Jeanie? She always resented coming up here, and all you did was argue. Then after Dad died we stopped coming.’ I bite my tongue, unsure whether I am in fact making an accusation.

  Jeanie sighs, runs a hand across her forehead, creased with her remembering. ‘There were many things we disagreed on, your mother and I. And after Charlie died… You know, he wanted to be cremated – he said as much when he knew just how ill he was. Said he wanted to have his ashes scattered back here in Shetland. But your mother wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted on a formal burial down south.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t come to the funeral?’

  She takes my h
and in hers once more, her eyes shining.

  ‘I’m sorry, love.’

  She is so much older than my mother – my mother who married a man twenty years her senior – and so much more grounded, I think to myself. All her married life she has lived in this old house, safe and secure as the seasons change around her, year after year.

  I smile to myself as I hear a burst of infant giggles through the open door to the living room. Neil knows just how to make Boo laugh. The sound awakens the ghosts of memories that are not mine: a happy house full of Jeanie’s children – long since grown – the childhood that I wish I could have had.

  ‘But please write to her,’ my aunt presses. ‘She cares about you.’

  ‘I wonder sometimes,’ I say sharply. ‘You know, she wanted me to marry him. She was the one who pushed me, said I owe it to my daughter to provide her with a stable family, save her from the shame of having an unmarried mother. But I couldn’t go through with it… for Boo’s sake: I couldn’t bear the thought of her growing up with a father like that. Better no father at all.’

  Jeanie is silent for a moment. When she speaks I hear the hint of a smile in her voice.

  ‘You always knew your own mind, Martha.’

  Obstinately I wipe the unbidden tears from my cheeks, determined to be strong, to show everyone that I have made the right decision. I had thought that here, so far from the life I had longed to escape from, I would find freedom from its haunting memories. Yet I am bruised and fearful. Perhaps we have not travelled far enough.

  ‘What if she tells him where I am? What if he comes looking for Boo?’ I say with difficulty, my chest tight. I recall Neil’s inappropriate joke on the ferry, born from his own nervousness: …find him stowed away under the wheel arches…

  A shadow falls across Jeanie’s face. I shiver with the sudden sensation of cold; I know she cannot protect me. But firmly she says, ‘you are not alone anymore, Martha.’